Tag Archives: Kofi Siriboe
Fantasy Casting movies

Fantasy Casting: The black creator of the tricycle needs an actor to portray him

By on Monday, May 8, 2017

It’s nearing Oscar movie season already, and while a movie about Matthew Cherry, the inventor of the tricycle, wouldn’t be able to be made for this season, it would be great to see a movie about Cherry come about at some point in the near future.

A little bit of background on Cherry: Cherry developed two devices that changed transportation forever. The first, the velocipede, was a metal frame with two or three wheels attached. The person using the vehicle of sorts would propel themselves with their feet. This original design went on to become what we now know of as the bicycle and tricycle. Cherry’s final tricycle design received a patent in May 1888.

Cherry’s second device helped innovate streetcars. To keep streetcars from becoming irreparably damaged from the impact of other streetcars, Cherry invented the street car fender and received a patent for the street car fender January 1895. Even though the invention has been modified since its creation, Cherry’s fenders are now used on all types of transportation. (blackthen.com, blackinventor.com)

So, now that the learning portion of this article is done, let’s talk about who could play this guy in the biopic that would most certainly be up for nominations and awards. I see Trevante Rhodes from Moonlight playing this character. To me, they look similar enough that it would be convincing, and it would just be fun to have a film like this be Rhodes’ follow-up to his award-winning debut. A film like this could only keep his award streak up.

(Twitter, The Hollywood Reporter screencap)

Another person good for this role could be Kofi Siriboe from Queen Sugar. He also favors Cherry and, from what he’s done on Queen Sugar, he’s begging to be the lead in a movie. All he needs is a chance (and, maybe, now that I’m thinking about it, this project could also be something cool for Ava DuVernay to attach her name to, that way the entire production can stay within the DuVernay movie family).

(Twitter, OWN screencap)

Whoever plays this guy, though, I’d go see this film. We all have fond memories of our first tricycle–I know I do-mine was candy apple red and was awesome–but not many of us knew who to show our gratitude towards. How sad and funny that it so happens that the inventor of one of the most iconic toys in American history is a black man, yet none of our history books reflect that fact.

Who do you want to see portray the inventor of the tricycle? Give your opinions in the comments section below.

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media media literacy movies

Representation count: What “Rough Night” and “Girls Trip” mean for you

By on Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures

The upcoming film Rough Night is being marketed as the next feel-good comedy for raunchy feminist women looking for a film that portrays women as “women.” Starring Scarlett Johansson (who is currently taking an L for Ghost in the Shell), Zoë Kravitz, Kate McKinnon, Demi Moore, Colton Haynes, Jillian Bell, Ty Burrell, Dean Winters, Ilana Glazer, and Karan Soni, the film follows a group of best friends who meet in Miami Beach to celebrate one of their own’s wedding, only to somehow kill a male stripper. The film will be in theaters June 16.

Here’s the red band trailer for you see the film for yourself:

Are you on the fence about seeing this movie? If you need help getting your mind together, here are some things we can glean from the trailer and Twitter chatter that might help.

The racial representation is low: Kravitz and Soni are the only people of color in the main cast (I guess, if you want to be technical about, you can include Ty Burrell since he did find out he has black ancestry…but he’s as black as I am East Asian. We’ll still welcome him in the Racial Draft, though.) It’s a shame that, as much as Kravitz has talked openly about racism in the casting office, she’s still relegated to being “the black friend” in a movie. There’s no telling what Soni’s character “Raviv” does. But one can assume he’s not a major character.

Not mentioned in this rundown is Enrique Murciano. He could very well be a part of the main cast, but as of this post, his character hasn’t been named on IMDB, which points in the direction of him being a minor character. However, we’ll have to see once the film is released to theaters.

The fat jokes are many, just in the trailer: So, the trailer spoils for us that Jillian Bell’s character Alice is the one who kills the stripper by basically jumping on his lap, but actually landing on his neck, with the brute force propelling the poor guy on his back, where his head hits the hard tile floor, causing a fatal brain (and possibly neck) injury. Quite gruesome. But what’s also gruesome is that the death is played as the punchline to the age-old joke of the plus-size woman being somehow grotesque, foolish, and less-than the other skinnier women she’s surrounded by. It’s no mistake that the one getting married is Johansson, not Bell.

You can tell who’s the lead woman in charge, can’t you? Everyone else has some minor or major “difference” with them.

Minor gay representation in the cast, no word on their characters’ sexualities: We do have out actors Haynes and McKinnon as a part of this film, but their characters are probably straight, if we go by Hollywood history.

The fact that the film’s jokey premise rests on a male stripper being brutally killed while doing his job: The real victim of this story aren’t the women at the bachelorette party; it’s the dude who was doing his job that night. I know the film is trying to pull a Weekend at Bernie’s thing, but I don’t think storylines like that are going to fly nowadays, especially since the guy at the center of this story is an innocent guy just trying to make a living. At least Bernie was in with the mob! He knew the risks! (Not that his being a criminal precludes he should die, but you get what I’m saying.)

Look, strippers have lives too, and his life should be given some sort of acknowledgement instead of just using him as a prop to advance the story.

Twitter isn’t really feeling this film for that reason:

https://twitter.com/etherealbabyy/status/840008636600524802

Refinery 29 has more on why folks are upset.

“First thing’s first: Strippers are people, and sex workers unfortunately have to tirelessly remind people of this over and over. ‘Sex workers are very marginalized groups of people who don’t have the same workplace safety and rights as other workers—and we get murdered a lot,’” says Arabelle Raphael, a porn performer and sex worker in Los Angeles. ‘Our lives are seen as disposable.’ A long-term mortality study on sex workers found that active sex workers have a mortality rate of 459 per 100,000 people—to put that in perspective, the general public mortality rate is around 1.9 per every 100,000 people.”

In short, this film just might become another L Johansson will have to live with. She certainly is getting red on her film ledger, indeed.

As if to act as a counter, Girls Trip will be hitting theaters July 21. The film, starring Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, Kofi Siriboe and Larenz Tate, features a group of girlfriends who go on a road trip to the annual Essence Festival in New Orleans. Along the way, they rediscover their friendship while getting into all kinds of romantic and wild misadventures. Also: no male strippers get killed.

Here’s the red band trailer for Girls Trip:

So what’s in this film for you?

An all-black main cast: We don’t have to worry about diversity counts in this cast. Us black people are covered. And, if you’re an ally looking to support a black cast, you can’t find a better one. Not only do you have OGs like Queen Latifah, Pinkett Smith, Hall, and Tate in the cast, but you also have relatively new faces like Haddish (who has been around for a while, but is still in the up-and-coming set) and Siriboe, who has made waves on the OWN hit show, Queen Sugar. Also, as the trailer shows, Morris Chestnut is also in the mix. There’s plenty for everyone!

No word on LGBT representation: We’ll have to see when the movie comes out.

The film is co-written by Kenya Barris: We love his writing on black-ish, and his funny writing is all over this film. Which means:

The trailer is laugh-out-loud funny: If just the trailer can make me laugh, then I’m sold. I didn’t laugh once in Rough Night’s trailer, and that’s not just because I was already side-eyeing the film. If there were some actually funny moments, I would have laughed; if something’s funny, I can’t not laugh. But I didn’t So, here we are.

It actually feels like a good time: This feels like a movie you want to go with your good girlfriends to see and make a night of it. This is definitely one of those films you go watch, go to dinner afterwards, then possibly go back to one of your friends’ house and drink wine and gossip (I write as if I drink wine…I’m just going off of what the Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder commercials tell me). In any event, it looks like great fun for the adult set, whether you take your friends, your significant other, or your adult siblings.

This looks they’re genuinely having a good time, right? I want to be a part of this friend group. (More than likely, I’d be Jada Pinkett Smith’s character.)

What do you think about Rough Night? Give your opinions below!

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